Lament for the Left Bank

Abstract

In 1940 Djuna Barnes, author of the notorious but weak-selling Nightwood (1936), received a commission from Harry A. Bull, editor of the New York-based society magazine Town & Country, to write a short reminiscence of Paris in the 1920s. The Nazi occupation of the erstwhile world capital of the avant-garde gave Town & Country's well-heeled readership reason to be nostalgic for Paris's glamorous recent past. As for Barnes, despite her dwindling book sales, she still had some celebrity—especially among those American readers who remembered her risqué onetime best seller Ryder (1928)—as an artist, journalist, and character of the Paris scene. Struggling with alcoholism and illness, and fiercely private, but desperate for money, she accepted the commission (Herring 242-50). Drawing on material in a notebook she had carried while working as a journalist in the 1920s (Caselli 116), as well as an unpublished 1939 essay, “Farewell Paris,” Barnes took her miniature memoir through several drafts over the course of 1940 and 1941.